Its largest campus building anywhere globally which can seat 15,000 people.

E-commerce giant Amazon formally opened on Wednesday its largest campus building anywhere globally in Hyderabad, a facility spread over 9.5 acres and comprising three million square feet of built up area.

The new campus is Amazon’s first owned office building outside the U.S. and is the single largest building globally. The office space of 1.8 million sq ft can seat 15,000 people.

“We have room both for growing [new hires] and consolidating” operations at the campus, Country Head Amit Agarwal said.

Amazon currently has eight office spaces in Hyderabad and “it is natural for us to bring people together in one place. This large building also gives us enough space to grow… we will do that in phases. Already 4,000 employees have moved in [to the new campus] from other locations [in Hyderabad].”

On the work that will be undertaken at the campus, Mr. Agarwal, in a media interaction after the inauguration of the facility, said Amazon has over 60,000 employees in the country “serving our global market places, including India”. A third of the employees are housed in Hyderabad. “This is the largest employee base and technology employee base outside of Seattle,” he said, adding software development engineers, machine learning scientists, product managers, finance and many other involved in various functions will be based out of the campus.

Room to grow

Asked on the economic slowdown and the likely impact on the business plans of Amazon, he said, “We haven’t seen any slowdown yet. One reason is e-commerce is very small portion of retail consumption in India, probably less than 3%. When it is that small, there is so much room to grow.”

Macro conditions are unlikely to seriously impact the e-commerce growth, he said, adding Amazon is committed to long term and “does not get distracted by what’s happening in short cycles. We continue to invest, add more selection, continue to make things more affordable, more faster… growing at a very heavy rate,” he said, without sharing numbers.

About investments made in India, he said: “We publicly announced $5 billion of investment so far and another $500 million in food retail. Outside of that we continue to invest in across our businesses.”

$1 billion exports

The company, Mr. Agarwal said, is registering “tremendous growth not just in our national business but also export business [with] 50,000 sellers now using the services to export to many countries outside where Amazon customers are based. That business has actually crossed $1 billion and we expect it to grow to $5 billion in next three years.”

Amazon vice-president (Global Real Estate and Facilities) John Schoettler said Amazon has roughly 40 million sq ft of office space globally across 300 different locations in over 40 countries. “In Seattle [headquarters] we have approximately 12 million sq ft, half of it owned and the rest leased. Hyderabad is the second location where we have our corporate office outside of the US.”

Telangana Home Minister Mohammed Mahmood and Industries and IT Secretary Jayesh Ranjan participated in the inauguration. Besides offices, Amazon in Telangana has three fulfilment centres offering more than 3.2 million cubic feet of storage space to sellers, two sort centres with 100,000 square feet of processing capacity and 90 delivery stations.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Hyderabad / by N. Ravi Kumar / Hyderabad – August 21st, 2019